Chinese energy figures suggest much slower growth than advertised

Last year China reported the slowest economic growth in 24 years, about 7.4 percent. But the true figure may actually be much lower, and the evidence is buried in electricity figures which show just 3.8 percent growth in electricity consumption.

David Fridley, a staff scientist in the China Energy Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been a longtime collaborator with the Chinese on energy management, efficiency and policy. Fridley, who has held Chinese energy-related jobs for 35 years, believes that electricity consumption in China is a better indicator of its economic growth.

Historically, electricity consumption and economic growth in China have been very closely linked. "From 2005 to 2013, the average elasticity of electricity demand was 1.09, meaning electricity demand was up about 1.09 percent for every percent rise in GDP," Fridley wrote in an email. "In 2014, that number fell to 0.51, the lowest in this 10-year period. During the economic crisis of 2008, it did fall below the average, to 0.60, but quickly rebounded to above 1."

Taking a short break--no post this week

I'm taking a short break this week and expect to post again on Sunday, April 26.

How the climate change debate got hijacked by the wrong standard of proof

Everyone loves a courtroom drama--especially one that pits a feisty, but a determined criminal defense attorney against the awesome power of a prosecutor who has the resources of the state behind him or her. We see such David and Goliath stories every week on television.

We cheer as the defense attorney pokes one hole after another in the case of the prosecutor, raising what the audience now perceives as reasonable doubt. But will the jury see it that way? We'll return after these messages....

This is just the sort of metaphorical setting into which the climate change denial lobby is trying to place the debate over climate change without the public or even most policymakers realizing it. The deniers in the fossil fuel industry and elsewhere are attempting by sleight-of-hand to get both the public and policymakers to abandon the preponderance of evidence standard used primarily in civil trials--and which is similar to evidence-based public policymaking--in favor of another judicial standard designed for criminal trials, namely, beyond a reasonable doubt.

The hidden reasons behind slow economic growth: Declining EROI, constrained net energy

It should seem obvious that it takes energy to get energy. And, when it takes more energy to get the energy we want, this usually spells higher prices since the energy inputs used cost more. Under such circumstances there is less energy left over for the rest of society to use, that is, for the non-energy gathering parts--the industrial, commercial and residential consumers of energy--than would otherwise be the case.

It shouldn't be surprising then that as fossil fuels, which provide more than 80 percent of the power modern society uses, become more energy intensive to extract and refine, there is a growing drag on economic activity as more and more of the economy's resources are devoted simply to getting the energy we want.

A more formal way of talking about this is Energy Return on Investment or EROI. The "energy return" is the energy we get for a particular "investment" of a unit of energy. The higher the EROI of an energy source, the cheaper it will be in both energy and financial terms--and the more energy that will be left over for the rest of society to use.

The puzzling flattening of carbon emissions and the problem of global growth

Last week we learned that maybe, just maybe, global carbon emissions were flat in 2014 even though the global economy supposedly grew by 3 percent. As Brad Plumer of Vox (whose work I greatly respect) points out, carbon emissions have moved up almost in lockstep with economic growth for the entire industrial age except during recessions and one year of growth 40 years ago.

This is why I use "supposedly" when referring to the global economic growth number. It's because there is another obvious and plausible explanation for the flat carbon emissions, namely, that the global economy did not grow by the stated percentage, that it may have grown only a fraction of that amount or not at all.

Economic measures are constantly being revised, and I think it is very likely that the global economic growth number for 2014 will be revised downward. Probably not to zero, but downward nonetheless. It's also possible that estimates of carbon emissions are too low. Plumer cites "notoriously unreliable" Chinese emission numbers as one reason to be skeptical.

Recent radio interview on Israeli National Radio

I was recently interviewed by Doug Goldstein on his personal finance show, "Goldstein on Gelt," which plays on Israeli National Radio, the English-language radio network in Israel. Goldstein saw a piece of mine and asked me on the show to discuss the recent sharp decline in oil prices. A podcast of the interview is now available. Goldstein is a good interviewer with an eclectic mind and brought out the best in me with his conversational approach. The interview starts at about 2:30. Click here to go to the page containing the podcast.

Cheap oil, complexity and counterintuitive conclusions

It is a staple of oil industry apologists to say that the recent swift decline in the price of oil is indicative of long-term abundance. This kind of logic is leading American car buyers to turn once again to less fuel efficient automobiles--trading efficiency for size essentially--as short-term developments are extrapolated far into the future.

The success of such argumentation depends on a disability in the audience reading it. The audience must have amnesia about the dramatic developments in the oil markets in the last 15 years which saw prices reach all-times highs in 2008 and then after recovering from post-crash lows linger at the highest average daily price ever from 2011 through most of 2014. And, that audience must have myopia about the future. It is an audience whose attention has narrowed to the present which becomes the only reference point for decision-making. History is bunk, and what is, always will be.

The alternative narrative is much more subtle and complex. As I've written before, the chief intellectual challenge of our age is that we live in complex systems, but we do not understand complexity. How can cheap oil be a harbinger of future supply problems in the oil market? Here's where complexity, history and subtle thinking all have to combine at just the right intellectual temperature to reveal the answer.

Lipstick on a pig: America as the world's swing producer of oil

Most people have heard the old saying: "You can put lipstick on a pig. But it's still a pig." That's sort of what is happening in the American oil patch as producers try to put a positive gloss on the devastation that low oil prices are visiting on the industry.

Perhaps the most inventive redefinition is as follows: The part of the U.S. oil industry devoted to extracting tight oil from deep shale reservoirs in places such as North Dakota and Texas has made the United States the world's "swing producer." A swing producer is a country or territory that has large production in relation to the total market, substantial excess capacity and the ability to turn its capacity on and off quickly in response to market conditions.

The term makes the U.S. oil industry sound powerful and important. And, while the U.S. industry remains an important player in the world--third in production behind Russia and Saudi Arabia--it is most definitely not powerful in the sense that the moniker "swing producer" would imply.

Taking a short break--no post this week

I'm taking a short break this week and next and expect to post again on Sunday, March 15.

What is Saudi Arabia not telling us about its oil future?

It is popular these days to speculate about why Saudi Arabia cajoled its OPEC allies into maintaining oil production in the face of flagging world demand. As the price the world pays for oil and oil products has plummeted, the price OPEC members are paying in terms of lower revenues is high, even unbearable for those who didn't save up for just such a rainy day.

Was the real reason for the decision to maintain production the desire to undermine rising U.S. tight oil production--which has now proven embarrassingly vulnerable to low prices after years of triumphalist talk from the industry about America's "energy renaissance"? Were the Saudis also thinking of crippling Canada's high-cost tar sands production? Was it Sunni Saudi Arabia's wish to undermine its chief adversary in the region, Shiite Iran? Was the Saudi kingdom doing Washington's bidding by weakening Russia, a country that relies so heavily on its oil export revenue?

The Saudis say explicitly that they believe non-OPEC producers must now balance world oil supply by cutting back production rather than relying on OPEC--meaning mostly Saudi Arabia--to do so. And, those cutbacks in the form of drastically reduced investment are already taking place in the United States, Canada and around the world as low prices are forcing drillers to scale back their drilling plans dramatically. It is not well understood, however, that almost all of the growth in world oil production since 2005 has come from high-cost deposits in the United States and Canada which has made the two countries easy and tempting targets for the Saudis' low-price strategy.